Moki Girls

To signify their unmarried status, these two Moki, or Hopi, women wear tightly wrapped "butterfly" or "ram's horns" hairstyles and cornmeal dust on their faces. As part of an ethnographic survey team headed by John Wesley Powell, John K. Hillers documented such variations in costume and facial adornment among the people of the mesas near the Grand Canyon. He photographed these women amid a variety of Hopi weavings, part of the tribe's material culture that would also have interested the survey team. Various members of the team took notes, collected artifacts, and photographed the Indians of the New Mexico and Arizona territories for the research files of the Smithsonian Institution.